Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 216: TV Lust (1977)

For what might be his last novel, Ed Wood returned to familiar territory.

Fans can never agree which of Ed Wood's movies qualify as his "first" and "last." Admittedly, there are a lot of factors to weigh here. Do the films in question still have to be extant today? Does it matter if they were never completed or released in Ed's lifetime? Furthermore, are we only considering his directing jobs, or should we take Ed's numerous credits as a producer, actor, screenwriter, and assistant director into account as well? It all depends on your definitions and your parameters.

Was this the end for Ed Wood?

Similar confusion surrounds Ed Wood's "first" and "last" novels. To the best of my knowledge, the earliest surviving Wood novel we have today is Casual Company: The Laugh of the Marines (1948), but in interviews, Eddie alluded to a few early manuscripts, including The Sunset Murders and The Inconvenient Corpse, that have not yet resurfaced. If one of those is found, it may supplant Casual Company as Ed Wood's literary debut. As for his last novel, the bibliography in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) ends with TV Lust (1977), a gay porn paperback that Eddie wrote for Eros Goldstripe under his most-used pseudonym, Dick Trent. The guidebooks Muddled Mind: The Collected Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (2001) and Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks (2013) likewise end their lists of Wood novels with TV Lust.

I cannot say with 100% certainty that TV Lust is the final full-length literary effort of Edward D. Wood, Jr. But it certainly arrived very late in Eddie's life. The author was in the end stages of alcoholism by the time it came out, and his most productive years were behind him. I think, when we ask about the first and last works of any artist in any medium, what we really want to know is: Where were they at the beginning of their career and where were they at the end of it? By those standards, TV Lust is a fitting farewell to Eddie's writing career. While Casual Company gave us a snapshot of twentysomething Eddie at the outset of his career, TV Lust shows where that career had taken him in three decades: straight into the gutter.

At first glance, TV Lust feels like a mere rehash of Killer in Drag aka Black Lace Drag (1963), the lurid, violent novel that truly marked the beginning of Eddie's prolific career in adult paperbacks. (For what it's worth, the bibliography in Nightmare of Ecstasy starts with Killer in Drag.) Once again, in TV Lust, Ed tells the story of an androgynous, cross-dressing young man, in this case Chris/Christine, who becomes a hired killer and makes some good money before his luck inevitably runs out. In Muddled Mind, author David C. Hayes is offhandedly dismissive of the novel due to its perceived absence of originality and flair. He writes:

The rigors of writing smut were definitely telling on Wood at this point. The rehashed plot of the transvestite hitman certainly wasn’t original this time around, and the usual colorful characters are almost nonexistent. The flair that made some of his other novels and films bearable, even through a thin plot and the strange grammar, was noticeably absent from TV Lust. It seems as though Ed Wood had finally given up.

As I've made my way through the Wood novels over the course of the last decade, I've found myself agreeing with Hayes less and less, and this is definitely one of those times when I feel his review is not terribly accurate or helpful. Hayes' problem may be that he chose to read too many of Wood's books in too short a timeframe. I've been there myself. Once you get to TV Lust, you start to feel like a bloated contender in the final round of an eating contest, forcing yourself to take just one more bite but hardly being excited about doing so. 

While TV Lust will never be one of my favorite Wood novels, I see no evidence indicating that Ed Wood had "given up" on anything when he wrote it. It's the kind of story that he might have told at any point in his writing career, at least from the '60s onward. With the benefit of hindsight, knowing the author's remaining time on earth was short, we can see this book as Ed exploring his career-long obsessions—women's clothing, death, booze, prostitution, etc.—one last time. Along the way, the author even trots out some of his classic phrases, like "youthful boobs," "sweater girl," "swap spits," and "love object." It's like all these classic Woodian tropes are taking their curtain call. Besides, you can flip to pretty much any page in this novel and find examples of Ed Wood's beautifully tortured writing style. Here's an evocative passage from Chapter Five as the protagonist deals with his father's death:

He got up from the bed and crossed to a chair which was near the window. There wasn’t much to see beyond, but he stared into space … a starless space …the great black beyond. … that’s where his father was … out there somewhere in eternity … he’d never come back. … he’d never be able to tell what he had thought at that moment of recognition, that he had sired a pup which was neither boy or girl.

TV Lust is filled with passages like that, so I'm not sure what Hayes means when he says the book lacks "flair." From where I stand, it has plenty of Ed Wood's unmistakable style. No other author could (or would) have written this.

When I reviewed Diary of a Transvestite Hooker (1973) a couple of weeks ago, I noted that Ed Wood must have been more sober and coherent than usual when he wrote it, because the book largely tells the main character's story in a straightforward, linear fashion. TV Lust, in contrast, is one of Ed Wood's rambling, Proustian novels. Most of the book is taken up with flashbacks that Chris/Christine is having while preparing to carry out a hit. Through these detailed memories, we learn quite a bit about the character's previous life: how he started cross-dressing as an adolescent, how this habit led to a rift with his wealthy father, how he got involved with the sex film industry, and how he eventually became a hitman for the syndicate. Ultimately, because of these extensive flashbacks, Chris becomes one of the more well-rounded and fully-dimensional characters in the Wood canon.

A Station of the Cross.

Hayes complains that TV Lust lacks "the usual colorful characters" that we find in Ed Wood's other novels. Again, I'd point out that Chris himself is given a surprising amount of depth in the novel. We follow him from his early days in the small town of Grandview, where he has his first, fumbling sexual encounters. After a brief, traumatic stint in college, he transitions into the professional world, working as a secretary and living completely as a woman. It's the secretarial job that becomes the unlikely springboard to his criminal career. Above all, what seems to motivate him is his total obsession with women's clothing. When he schemes to get his hands on an angora sweater, it's like a junkie scheming how to get his next fix.

Along the way, as he races toward the inevitable, Chris encounters any number of memorable characters. Early on, for example, we meet Chris' fun-loving, hard-drinking older sister, Shirley—what, you thought we were getting through an Ed Wood novel without a Shirley?—who at first enables her brother's cross-dressing but then disowns him when he takes it too far. Then, there is Tiny, a vivacious and outgoing bisexual woman who takes a keen interest in Chris after they meet at work. Even more intriguing is Tiny's fashionable, mysterious, cross-dressing brother Richard aka Regina, who leads Chris into a life of crime, becomes his lover, then betrays him. Naturally, we have to have a few truly unsavory characters in every Ed Wood book, and TV Lust is no exception. Besides Richard, the heavies here include Talley, Richard's thuggish college roommate, and Solly, an overweight, cigar-chomping pornographer with possible mob connections.

More than anything, reading TV Lust took me back to those Catholic masses that my parents made me sit through, week after week, when I was a child. Along the walls of the church were displays showing the Stations of the Cross, and I spent hours studying these bas-relief vignettes of Christ's suffering and death: "Jesus Falls the First Time," "Jesus Falls a Second Time," "Jesus Speaks to the Holy Women," and so on. Well, TV Lust is like Ed Wood's Stations of the Cross. We get all the classic Woodian moments: "Chris Trades Clothes With an Adventurous Local Girl," "Chris Gets Caught in Drag by His Conservative Father," "Chris Becomes Estranged from His Entire Family," "Chris Dresses Like a French Maid While Being Whipped by His Favorite Prostitute," "Chris Makes His First Porno Film," and finally, "Chris Gets Killed in an Alley."

Come to think of it, maybe there's some special significance to the lead character's name: Chris/Christine. If TV Lust is meant to be Wood's twisted, degraded version of the Christ story, complete with its own cognates of Judas Iscariot and Mary Magdalene, that makes it one of the most intriguing novels he ever wrote.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 215: "Zeus and His Lovers" (1973)

Zeus was a horny bastard, as Ed Wood understood all too well.

I've covered dozens of Ed Wood's short stories and articles over the years, but I've never owned any of the vintage adult magazines in which they were originally published a half-century or more ago. Most of the short pieces that I've reviewed on this blog have come from the three marvelous Wood anthologies assembled by Bob Blackburn between 2014 and 2022. The magazines Ed Wood worked on during the 1960s and '70s have become very expensive on the secondary market—well out of my price range—and I'm grateful to Bob for buying dozens of them so that Ed's work can be reprinted and enjoyed by fans today.  A few more of Ed's articles have been sent my way by generous readers, typically as PDFs or JPGs. Those were much appreciated as well.

I now own this exact magazine.

Recently, though, reader and podcaster Rob Huffman let me know that a copy of the May/June 1973 issue of Gallery Press' Boy Play was available online for a stunningly low price, and I couldn't resist. The Nixon-era gay porn magazine contained one verified short story credited to Ed Wood, but based on past conversations with Greg Javer, I knew that Eddie probably wrote multiple pieces for that same issue. Sure enough, when the copy of Boy Play arrived in my mailbox a couple of weeks later, I found Ed's unmistakable writing style throughout the entire issue. My preliminary diagnosis is that Eddie wrote every last word in it, including the unsigned editorial at the beginning. Hell, he may have written the copy in the ads!

Would you believe it took me this long to realize that Boy Play is a mere reversal of Playboy, the most famous adult magazine ever published in America? Funny how swapping those two syllables makes all the difference in the world.

I'll probably end up writing multiple blog posts about this one magazine. For now, though, I'd like to concentrate on the one short story in this issue that Ed wrote under his own name. It's called "Zeus and His Lovers," and the title gives you a good indication of its contents.

The story: "Zeus and His Lovers" (aka "Zeus... and His Lovers"), originally published in Boy Play, vol. 2, no. 2, May/June 1973. Credited to Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Synopsis: Zeus, king of the Greek gods, is happily married to Hera. They have an extremely active and mutually satisfying sex life. In addition, Zeus has numerous mistresses, a fact he does not hide from Hera. However, there is still something bothering him. He feels tremendous pressure to compete sexually with the other male gods, and it seems that all of them have taken young boys as lovers. Zeus is the only one who hasn't.

Zeus and Hera have a marathon lovemaking session. In the afterglow, the god and goddess discuss Zeus' sexual dilemma. The other gods have definitely noticed that he doesn't have a boy lover, and they're starting to talk. There's even a popular "epigram" about Zeus that's going around. Hera tells her husband that she supports him totally in whatever he does and would not be hurt if he took a young male lover. Zeus tells her he already has a boy picked out: a beautiful mortal named Ganymede, who will be the new cupbearer to the gods.

Wood trademarks: mythology (cf. "Thor and His Magic Hammer"); the word "lovely" (cf. Glen or Glenda, many others); heavy use of ellipses and italics; sheer material; supposedly "new" things that are not really new (cf. Glenda); references to characters' body temperatures; pink clouds; kaleidoscope; androgyny; ancient Greece (cf. "The Greeks Had a Word For It," "Sappho Revisited").

Excerpt:

"It is not for me to say what you should do, Zeus. It is only that I must serve you. You must do as you see fit. And if that is the fad, then you should most certainly investigate the cause for the fad and find out what enjoyment might be captured in the tender young bodies of boys."

Reflections: Back in 2022, the late, great Greg Javer and I reviewed an Ed Wood story from 1973 called "Thor and His Magic Hammer." As its title suggests, this strange little fable explores the sex life of the Norse god of thunder, specifically how a mortal woman named Andralia gives Thor a few pointers in the bedroom and makes him a better lover. "Magic Hammer" originally appeared in the May/June 1973 issue of Gallery Press' Goddess. That makes it an obvious counterpart to "Zeus and His Lovers": same publisher, same release date, similar subject matter. Eddie must've been going through a mythology phase in 1973. Or maybe the subject was always on his mind. Remember that Glen or Glenda (1953) makes an incongruous reference to Morpheus, god of sleep.

In hindsight, it's not difficult to see what attracted Ed to this strange, often disturbing material. Greek mythology is rife with loathsome and depraved behavior, much of it sexual in nature, including instances of adultery, rape, incest, and pedophilia. This is the stuff of trashy, exploitative fiction, exactly the kind that Ed Wood wrote. The fact that the Greek gods are capable of supernatural acts, such as turning into animals, only aids them in their debauchery. Their perversion truly knows no bounds.

While the story of Zeus and Ganymede inspired artists for centuries, it seems today like a textbook case of predatory sexual behavior.  According to the myth, Zeus was so taken with this beautiful adolescent boy that he took the form of an eagle, swooped down to earth, grabbed Ganymede, and carried him back to Mount Olympus. There, Ganymede indeed became the cupbearer to the gods, just as it says in this story, as well as Zeus' lover. It's never clear that Ganymede consented to any of this. Nevertheless, Zeus was so grateful for the boy's service that he granted Ganymede eternal youth and beauty. Is anyone else reminded of the real-life story of Liberace and Scott Thorson? While the famed pianist could not make his young lover immortal, he did pay for Thorson to have numerous plastic surgeries.

It's interesting to note that, in "Zeus and His Lovers," Ed Wood portrays Zeus' wife, Hera, as simpering and submissive. Greek mythology portrays her as anything but. In fact, Zeus' love affair with Ganymede angered Hera greatly. She was intensely jealous of her husband's new boy toy and made no secret of this. So why does Ed write her like the ultimate supportive wife, a woman who encourages her husband to have numerous lovers, even young boys? Perhaps this was Ed's commentary on marriage and how a wife "should" behave.

I'd also like to point out that the rest of Boy Play magazine is not about "playing" with actual boys. The magazine includes many explicit pornographic photos of men, and they're all very much of age. Some even look rather weather-beaten. Again, as with his story for Goddess magazine, Eddie may have taken the title of the publication too literally. Maybe even he didn't get the wordplay. 

Podcast Tuesday: "Fonz of the Baskervilles"

Fonzie (Henry Winkler) meets Sherlock Holmes in Victorian London.

Contemporary critics may see the animated series The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang as a disappointment or even an outright failure because it "only" lasted 24 episodes between 1980 and 1981. Apparently, to be successful by modern standards, a show has to accumulate many dozens of episodes spread out over numerous seasons. The live-action Happy Days, for instance, ran for 11 seasons and 255 episodes. Now that's an impressive run! Its cartoon counterpart didn't survive nearly so long.

What people overlook is that it was the norm at Hanna-Barbera from the 1960s to the 1980s to produce only a handful of episodes for each of its series and then rerun those same episodes over and over for years. Long-running series like The Flintstones and The Smurfs were the exception, not the rule. The original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? only ran 25 episodes from 1969 to 1970. Jabberjaw and Hong Kong Phooey ran 16 episodes apiece. Josie and the Pussycats ran 31 episodes, but that's only if you count Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. Wacky Races only ran 17 episodes, and that got two spinoffs! By those standards, The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang did respectably.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we arrive at the final episode of the animated series, entitled "Give Me a Hand, Something's Afoot." This time, Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and his friends travel to 1894 London and meet the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes (Henry Polic II). If you were hoping for an epic Sherlock/Fonzie team-up, however, this episode may be a bit of a letdown. The characters do meet, but they don't really work together for long. The famous detective's archenemy, Professor Moriarty, is here, but Holmes' sidekick, Dr. Watson, is mysteriously absent.

Does this mean "Something's Afoot" is a bad episode, though? Listen to the latest installment of the podcast to find out!

Ed Wood Extra! Harry Medved revisits Plan 9 on Locationland (2025)

Tor Johnson emerges from his grave in Plan 9.

We may have celebrated the 100th anniversary of Ed Wood's birth in 2024, but the party is continuing well into 2025, folks. We all know film historian and critic Harry Medved as the co-author of The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), i..e. the book that brought posthumous fame to Ed Wood. Well, these days, Harry is working on a series of videos for PBS entitled Locationland in which he visits the Southern California filming locations of some of Hollywood's golden classics. 

Did you think he'd forget about Eddie? Fat chance!

In today's episode, premiering at 6:00 pm PST, Harry visits the filming locations for Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Harry's guests include comedian and writer Dana Gould, author Katharine Coldiron, and our very own Bob Blackburn, the co-heir of Kathy Wood's estate. You can watch the premiere of Plan 9 episode of Locationland right here. And you can watch a trailer for the episode right here. And if, by chance, you need a little more Medved in your life, Will Sloan recently interviewed Harry about The Golden Turkey Awards. You can find that right here.

Happy viewing/listening!

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 214: 'Diary of a Transvestite Hooker' (1973)

Is this Ed Wood book from 1973 worth your time in 2025?

Ed Wood wrote many (!) books between 1963 and 1977, both fiction and nonfiction, but very few of them are in print and readily available to the public today.  Despite (or maybe because of) this scarcity, interest in Ed's written work remains high among fans. Dedicated Woodologists still want to study these forbidden volumes, especially after they've read Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992), which contains a lengthy and detailed bibliography section, complete with tantalizing cover art and lurid quotes from the original paperbacks. Subsequent books like Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (2001) and Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks (2013) have also focused on Ed's colorful and prolific writing career.

This has created a strangely persistent gray market on sites like Amazon and Ebay. Independent, small-time publishers with no legal claim to Ed Wood whatsoever will boldly put out their own editions of Eddie's books. The prices for such reissues, although not necessarily cheap, are substantially less than you'd pay for actual vintage paperbacks from the 1960s and '70s. The estate of Kathy Wood, Ed's widow, has tried to put a stop to this practice, but it's like a never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole. You knock one down, and another has already popped up.

Here's what Bob Blackburn, co-heir of Kathy Wood's estate, has to say about the matter:

You are correct about the plethora of bootlegs out there. Part of the problem is, like on Amazon, I need to 100% prove that I am now the copyright owner for them to halt sales. This is nearly impossible to do, even though in the mid-late 1990s Bob [Weinberg, Kathy's attorney] got about 8-10 titles copyrighted in Kathy Wood's name. 

I have broached the subject with Ben Ohmart at Bear Manor of potentially re-publishing some of these down the road, and hopefully we will. Of course, Killer In Drag (1963) and Death of a Transvestite (1967) were legally reprinted in the late 1990s around the time Bob got [Ed Wood's memoir] Hollywood Rat Race published [in 1998]. And yes, it is "whack-a-mole." So, hopefully this year we can get some of Ed's titles out there legitimately. I am hoping to get some of those that come from ed's personal collection and call them, "The Ed Wood Jr., Signature Collection" and use scans of Ed's signatures as proof that they're from the estate.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 213: 'The Muddled Years of Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1946-1948' (2025)

In his new book, James Pontolillo covers a misunderstood era of Ed Wood's life.

The biopic Ed Wood (1994) only covers a brief span in the life of its title character. The story starts with Ed (Johnny Depp) directing a production of his play The Casual Company circa 1952 and ends with the (improbably grand) premiere of Ed's feature film Plan 9 from Outer Space in 1957. That's five years out of a 54-year life, about 30 of which were spent in Hollywood. In their introduction to the published screenplay of Ed Wood, writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski explain their reasoning for limiting the film's scope:

First, we decided that most film biographies were boring. They seem compelled to follow the subject from cradle to grave. We felt this was too much to cover. Why is somebody's death important? The result often ends up quickly skimming the surface and being uninvolving. So we determined that we would only cover five years—the period that Ed was actually "famous" for.

I heartily agree with this streamlined approach. A good biopic should take the life of its subject and mold it into a satisfying three-act story, and that's exactly what Ed Wood does. Besides, most people who watch that movie will be content with seeing Ed during his prime years, making his most iconic films and working with his idol, Bela Lugosi (as portrayed by Martin Landau).

But then, there are the diehards. The completists. The collectors and catalogers. The makers of lists and writers of essays. They can't be satisfied with a mere capsulized history of their hero. They want the entire, sordid Ed Wood saga, stem to stern. Well, they're in luck this week, because James Pontolillo is back with his second highly specific book about Eddie's early years. 

James' first book, The Unknown War of Edward D. Wood, Jr. 1942-1946 (2017), laid bare Eddie's much-mythologized service record as a Marine during World War II. The sequel, The Muddled Years of Edward D. Wood, Jr. 1946-1948 (2025), basically picks up where the previous volume left off. It covers Ed's life from the time he was honorably discharged through the making of his abortive Western, Crossroads of Laredo (1948).

This was a pivotal time in Ed Wood's life, as it would be in any young person's life. From his birth in 1924 to his induction into the military in 1942, Ed's fate was obviously guided by his parents, his employers, and his teachers. After that, Uncle Sam was definitely calling the shots, even telling him when to get up and when to go to bed. But, as of 1946, Eddie was officially an adult in charge of his own destiny. So what did he do with his newfound freedom?

We've heard various accounts of this transitional period in Ed Wood's life, most of them coming from Eddie himself. But the director of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) had a tentative relationship with the truth, to put it mildly, so it's difficult to know what's accurate and what isn't. Did he really perform in drag in New York nightclubs? Did he tour with a traveling carnival as a half-man, half-woman? Did he study with famed choreographer Martha Graham? Did he spy on the Ice Capades for the U.S. government? James Pontolillo is here to investigate each and every one of these claims, plus several more.

Look, I can't "review" this book in any objective way, since I wrote the foreword to it and am quoted in the text several times. But I can honestly report that this book not only gave me a lot of new information, it also caused me to look at Ed Wood's career in a new way, particularly in regards to the various plays Ed studied that may have influenced his later writing. 

James has told me he didn't intend for his book to be any kind of definitive, final statement about this time in Ed's life. And he admits that there are still gaps in the chronology that have stubbornly resisted even his formidable research abilities. But The Muddled Years of Edward D. Wood, Jr. certainly supplies ample food for thought. I can pay it no higher compliment than that. Like The Unknown War, this is a quick, fulfilling read that sheds light on some of the darker corners of Ed Wood's colorful life. It's worth your time.

The Muddled Years of Edward D. Wood, Jr. is available right here.